


Firefight

by Sholio



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Aftermath of Torture, Gen, Gun Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-12
Updated: 2016-12-12
Packaged: 2018-09-08 03:18:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8828371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Daniel's been taken; Peggy and Jack get him back. An expanded version of one of the scenarios hinted at in Quid Pro Quo, which also fills my h/c bingo "hostages" square.





	

**Author's Note:**

> From an askbox request on tumblr: _If you're ever taking prompts again please do an expansion on that scene you wrote for the Jack and Daniel in hospitals fic where Jack and Peggy have to go and rescue Daniel from a Leviathan prison. I'm so curious about all that._
> 
> This is an expanded version of vignette #4 in [Quid Pro Quo](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7130462).
> 
> [Also posted on Tumblr.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/154373315383/if-youre-ever-taking-prompts-again-please-do-an)

It had been a long time since Jack had been in combat with Peggy. And it just figured that this mission would bring back powerful memories of that first time in Belarus, over a decade ago. There'd been a lot of water under the bridge since then, but here they were, storming a Leviathan facility in the mountains of the Caucasus with a SHIELD strike team and the ragtag leftovers of what used to be the Howling Commandos, at least the ones Peggy had been able to scrape together in a hurry.

It was a typical Peggy operation, last-minute and insane and twelve kinds of illegal, but weirdly well organized for all of that. Daniel had been in Leviathan hands for two weeks, and Peggy had been in contact with Jack at his London post with the U.S. embassy for most of that time. None of his contacts or hers had managed a shred of progress at getting Daniel back through diplomatic channels. Russia flatly claimed they didn't have him. But then, Russia had been working hard to deny all knowledge of Leviathan ever since the organization's existence came to light.

And when Peggy had called Jack at 2 a.m. his time and told him she was flying a strike team to the Soviet Union and was he in, he hadn't had a moment's hesitation before he told her that he was. Next thing he knew, he was gearing up and getting on a flight to an airstrip near the Turkey-Georgia border, there to board a flight that he wasn't supposed to know about (and their governments definitely didn't) to fly to a location that didn't officially exist.

And now here they were in the thick of the smoke and noise of combat, side by side with assault rifles in hand, just like old times. 

"Fire in the hole!" Dugan's voice bellowed from higher up on the mountainside, and a grenade blew the side out of the nearest wing of the concrete fortress crouched on the slope above a steep plunge to a river valley. Jack ducked as chips of flying concrete and dirt stung his face.

"Don't forget _we're_ down here, you ape!" Peggy shouted up the hill.

"What's the matter, Peg, don't trust my aim?" In the middle of the sentence, Dugan picked off a Leviathan sniper who had just appeared on top of the building a few yards in front of him with a from-the-hip shotgun blast, not even pausing for breath.

The multi-level facility was stacked like a pile of children's blocks up the side of the mountain, making their attack plan more complicated. Right now Jack and Peggy were standing on the roof of one level, with Leviathan under their feet as well as above them. Peggy glanced at him; he shrugged, and the two of them hunkered down and opened fire to pick off Leviathan agents emerging from the hole ripped in the side of the wing of the building in front of them.

There had been a fierce argument on the plane over whether to land as close as they could get and go in on foot, or face a building full of riled-up enemies by landing on Leviathan's own airstrip. In the end, they'd gone for a frontal assault because they just didn't have a choice. The nearest landing site their pilot had been able to find was two days' hike away, over extremely rough country. They all knew that days -- hours, even -- were precious as gold right now, against the ever-slimming chance that Daniel was still alive to be rescued.

So they'd come slamming into Leviathan's landing strip just above the facility. Personally Jack thought it was overly generous to dignify it with the term "airstrip" as opposed to "slightly less steep piece of mountain." The small cargo plane had landed pointing uphill, needing the steep pitch of the hillside to stop before it smashed into the rocks at the end, and it had not escaped Jack's notice that the airstrip wasn't actually long enough to take off from, and ended over a sheer plunge into the valley. They were going to have to rely upon the drop to get enough speed for the takeoff.

Still, the getaway plane was waiting for them with engines spun up. Part of their team had stayed behind to keep Leviathan away from it, and the rest stormed the facility.

Once Dugan and the rest of his team had finished picking off the Leviathan soldiers who'd come running to the site of the explosion, Peggy and Jack and the other two members of _their_ team burst inside. It was so damn similar to that other place, exposed concrete walls and utilitarian corridors, all of it pervaded by a dank chill in the air -- summer in the mountains felt to Jack like early winter. He had to shake off the ghostly breath of the past, raising the hairs on the back of his neck. He told himself that this mission wasn't going to go like the other one had.

The radio crackled, and Happy Sam, leader of the third team who had taken the topmost levels of the facility, said tersely, "Clear up here."

"Down," Jack murmured, his ears ringing from the last blast of gunfire, and Peggy nodded. 

On the plane, for the first time since he'd known her, she had looked like a woman pushing forty, wearing no makeup, her face set in new, grim lines from lack of sleep and stress, her hair twisted back in a no-nonsense ponytail. Right now, though, despite the desperation of their mission, she seemed to have come alive. Her face was fierce and eager.

Peggy was born for field work. She wasn't exactly wasted behind a desk -- she was damn good at that, too -- but there had to be a part of her that missed being out here, throwing herself physically into the action.

And, God help him, there was a part of him that missed it too. 

They pounded down a flight of stairs and lost their rear man, Mikkelson, when a Leviathan agent popped up from nowhere and took him out. "Dead," murmured the fourth member of their team, Redmond, as he snapped off Mikkelson's dog tags. Peggy only nodded, a cold light in her eyes. It was a weight she'd carry for the rest of her life, Jack knew, as he still carried Li's death and the deaths of other men who'd died on his watch. It was worse in this case because every member of their team was here out of personal loyalty to Peggy. They all knew that if this mission went sideways, it was possible that they'd end up rotting in a Leviathan cell themselves, or that they'd be called to account for their actions in front of an American court.

Or that they'd fall, helping Peggy try to rescue a man who might already be dead.

And they were all here anyway.

They took out two more Leviathan operatives in a series of branching corridors that went back into the hillside. This area looked promising to Jack, a series of small rooms that seemed to be used for storage. It slowed them down because they had to check each one, kicking in doors only to find nothing but storerooms with bare concrete floors. Sam's team joined them, or at least the three that were left; he'd lost a guy, too.

"Three teams of two," Peggy ordered as the corridor branched, and branched again, forcing them to split up. Redmond went with Jack, the two of them penetrating deeper into the hillside. The cold was deeper here, far away from the sun. They were clearly heading toward something, though, since heavy conduits ran along the walls, indicating the presence of electricity and -- water, gas? God alone knew.

The door at the end of the hall opened onto blackness. Jack shone a flashlight around -- it glimmered off screens and cables. Redmond found a light switch and suddenly the room was bathed in harsh brilliance.

It didn't really help, though. The room was smallish for the amount of equipment crammed into it, banks of it all around the walls. In the middle of the room stood a tin capsule which immediately made Jack think of the space-race stuff he'd seen (impossible to avoid, if you spent any time at all with Stark). Cables snaked to it from around the room.

Everyone knew the Russians were working on putting a guy in space, same as the Americans. Still, this didn't quite have the right look to Jack. He wasn't sure what it was about that oversized tin can that made his skin crawl, particularly the empty cradle inside, with all its attendant tube-ends. The door with its glassed-in port stood open, as if something had erupted out of it ... or like it was waiting for something to crawl in.

It was small consolation that Redmond looked as creeped out as Jack felt. They both jumped when static burst from their radios. "Thompson, Redmond, you on?" It was Sam's voice, fuzzy with interference, as deep underground as they were.

"We're good," Jack said, still staring at the capsule, whatever the hell it was.

"Fall back," Sam said. "We've got him."

It took a moment to sink in. "You've got him -- alive?"

"Alive," Sam confirmed.

The relief was like a kick in the stomach. "Let's go," Jack told Redmond. Once they were both through the doorway, he let the other agent get ahead, and then turned and threw one of their precious, dwindling store of grenades back at whatever the hell that had been. They both took shelter as the explosion kicked the door halfway off its hinges. A deep rumble shook the entire facility, and dust billowed out into the hallway: the room had caved in.

"Tell me that was one of you," Sam said over the radio.

"Affirmative," Jack said, choking on the dust cloud billowing into the hallway. "Threat neutralized. Where are you?"

"Near the front. Right-hand side."

"You really have to do that?" Redmond wanted to know, as they left the room behind. "Getting shot at ain't enough; you gotta try to kill us in a cave-in too?"

"Yeah, I did. There was something not right about that place. You felt it too, right?"

"Yeah," Redmond muttered, looking away.

"Go on up top; clear our exit. I'll find the others."

He found Sam in the hallway just below the stairs where they'd first come down, standing watch with rifle at the ready outside a wide-open, iron-barred door. The smell of blood was like metal on the back of Jack's throat as he stepped through the doorway.

Peggy was on her knees, struggling with an iron shackle wrapped around a drainpipe. The room stank of blood and fouler things. Daniel was stripped to the waist, beaten and bloody, his head down with a tangled mess of hair hanging in his eyes. His artificial leg was off, the right leg of his fouled pants hanging empty and flat. Of all the things about the situation that made Jack's stomach turn, somehow that was the worst -- it was stupid to feel that Daniel should have been spared that indignity after they'd clearly tortured him, but a guy could take a few hits to the face. It wasn't goddamn right to do _that._

But the bastard was alive, and he looked up and gave Jack a lopsided, struggling kind of grin, which was somehow _even worse._

"Jack," Peggy said, looking up. "Do you see any tools -- a spanner, a pry bar, _something?"_

He found a length of iron pipe, and between the two of them, they snapped off the shackle. The other end dangled from Daniel's abraded wrist, but there was nothing to be done about it. As Daniel slumped into Peggy, she wrapped her arms around him and kissed him on the side of his damaged mouth, heedless of the blood and careful of his bruises.

"Hey, they've got reinforcements coming in," Dugan's voice came through the radio. "You better clear out, soon as you can."

Jack slung his jacket over Daniel's shoulders, hiding the worst of the bruises. He and Peggy got an arm around him from each side, getting him on his feet ... foot. One of Daniel's hands fisted tightly in Jack's T-shirt. Daniel was so goddamn cold; where Jack's hand was wrapped around his waist, under the jacket, his skin was like ice. He sagging heavily against them as they helped him out the door, and he hadn't said anything yet. Jack didn't want to know what that meant, if he was too out of it to talk, if he'd been drugged -- if there was brain damage from Leviathan smacking him around --

"Hey," he said, giving Daniel a small shake. "You in there?"

Daniel's response was a grunt, and a slightly tighter fist in Jack's shirt, a light tap on his shoulder. At least it was an acknowledgement, an indication that he was still in there somewhere. That he was still Daniel, however long the crawl back from here might turn out to be.

"Careful," Peggy murmured, and they had to maneuver around Mikkelson's body at the bottom of the stairs. Jack felt Daniel shiver against him. That was something he hadn't thought about, that Daniel would have to bear the human cost of the rescue mission as well.

But they'd deal with that later, when they were out.

They managed the stairs somehow, and emerged at the top to find a firefight raging outside. Peggy gasped and dragged them all three to the floor as a bullet zinged past them -- fired not from in front, Jack realized a second later, but from below.

"I've got your six," he snapped, handing Daniel off to her. "Get out as soon as Dugan clears you an exit."

She didn't argue, just nodded. Between the two of them, he and Sam laid down fire to push back the Leviathan agents coming up from behind. Peggy and Daniel made a break for it across the open ground between the blown-apart side of the building and the mountain's rocky slope, assisted by one of Dugan's guys who'd come down to take Daniel's other side. Jack and Sam backed up, working together in mute efficiency, holding off the pursuers as they made their retreat up the mountainside.

The cargo plane was waiting for them, engines screaming -- with a long, undefended stretch of ground between them and their escape. Jack and Sam took up sniper stations at the edge of the runway. Somewhere above the plane, Dugan and a couple of his guys had done likewise. They laid down cover fire to hold Leviathan off while Peggy got Daniel onboard. Jack didn't breathe easy until they'd made it up the cargo ramp.

"Now the rest of you," Peggy said over the radio. The plane rotated slowly, cargo door still open, until it was was pointing downhill, toward that precipitous dropoff.

"Grenade launcher!" Sam barked. He and Jack turned their fire on the bunker just down the hill. They managed to force the Leviathan agent back through the bunker's doors before he could fire on the plane, but the bastard still had a weapon capable of taking it down.

"You're gonna have to pick us up after," Dugan said through the radio, calm as only a man who'd spent a long career in hot zones could be.

"Don't be absurd; we're not leaving without you." Peggy's response was heated.

There was a part of Jack's brain that was nothing but one long scream of horror at the idea of being left behind. Maybe it was the part of him that had frozen up all those years ago; he wasn't sure. But one thing he did know: Peggy and Daniel were getting off this mountain, one way or another. He reached for his radio. "Do it. They're gonna take out the plane in a minute, Peggy. You gotta get out of here. You can come back for us."

"We are not --"

"For God's sake!" he snapped into the radio. "You have a medical emergency on board. Clear out, get him to a friggin' hospital, and come back for us. We can't get to you before they find a way to stop us all from leaving."

"Do it, ma'am," Happy Sam chimed in as soon as Jack let up the button. "We're good here. We'll lead 'em a merry chase and have stories to tell at the bar later."

Peggy didn't say anything, but the engines reached a fever pitch, the cargo plane straining with its brakes still firmly engaged and its nose pointed downhill.

"We'll be back," Peggy said. "Be here."

And then the plane bolted forward like a racehorse released from its stall, speeding down the mountain. _Godspeed,_ Jack thought, and there was only the smallest passing wish that he could be on that plane, crouching beside Daniel as Peggy was no doubt doing now, with a warm bed and a bath in front of him.

Instead he laid down cover fire to hold off the attackers just long enough for the plane to bob and drop over the edge of the precipice. For a tense instant it vanished from view, but then it reappeared, soaring into the sky. Bursts of Leviathan gunfire rattled after it, falling short as the plane caught air and lifted to merge with the clear blue of the horizon.

Jack and the remaining men fell back among the rocks and regrouped under a scraggly stand of pine trees. There were five of them, as it turned out: Dugan, Jack, Sam, and two SHIELD guys, Redmond and another guy, McMullin, who had been in Dugan's team. Both were calm, gripping their rifles in steady hands. SHIELD was still new enough that most of its field agents had been hand-picked by some combination of Peggy, Jack, Daniel, and General Phillips, so Jack trusted these men.

"She'll be back," Dugan said definitively. "Or if not, she'll send someone. Peggy won't leave us hanging. In the meantime, we can hole up somewhere, or make a run for the Black Sea -- it's maybe two, three days overland."

"Or?" Jack said, because he sensed another option coming.

Dugan glanced at him, and his teeth flashed in a humorless grin. "Or we go break some Leviathan heads. See what intel we can pick up. Make sure they'll be a long time rebuilding."

Jack smiled back, just as grim, a wolf's smile. The memory of Daniel shattered and bloody was already lodged in the deepest part of his brain where nightmares came from, as was that terrible room, whose purpose he didn't even know, but distrusted with some deep, atavistic instinct. "Yeah, I'd love to."

**Author's Note:**

> They don't know it, of course, but the room Jack and Redmond found was an early-type Winter Soldier facility.


End file.
